


Carefully Sheated

by XxxbladeangelxxX



Series: The After Days [2]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Gotham (TV)
Genre: ... I think?, Alternate Universe?, Angst?, Cannon divergence?, Gen, I don't Know I'm going to bed, I don't know the whole timeline and plot doesn't exist, Reference to Alcohol, Selina musing about things, Trigger Warning: self harming, allusions to self harm, so post cannon then?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 19:12:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8297048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XxxbladeangelxxX/pseuds/XxxbladeangelxxX
Summary: Times change. People change. The world changes. 
Even in a timeless city like Gotham the toll of the years is felt by all. 
For no matter how far removed we are from who we once were, the shades of our past always linger.

  He sits in the dark when she finds him, hunched and brooding, no doubt having pushed away whatever naive comfort his most recent stray had offered.





	

**Author's Note:**

> *screams into the void* SO a year after uploading my previous piece of rubbish writing I have come back to this series with another piece of my even more horrendous writing.
> 
> I had this a quarter way completed when i uploaded the previous one but lost all of my inspiration (and my notes) until i suddenly got the urge to finish this off again this weekend. The writing probably changes tone 'round about a quarter way through since I had started this thing around the time that I was still in sixth form (so it was bit of a blast from the near past) and its been around a year or so since I've touched it again.
> 
> Please don't expect this to be true characterisations or anything I only ever saw the first few episodes(a few years ago that is) so I don't have a very good grasp of everyone's voice.
> 
> Right sorry for the long note this work has not been beta'd by anyone other than myself.  
> I don't own anything other than my cringe worthy purple prose.

These days she was more Cat than Selina, wild and wicked and wilful, her claws diamond tipped  her tail now the crack of her whip. Smooth and Sleek and as dangerous as the cats she so often imitated during her youth.

Although, there is still enough Selina left to compel Cat to keep an eye on her older…acquaintances. Most had moved on, grown and changed and broken in some undefinable way by the inexorable pressure of life and love and tragedy.

All except for the stubborn detective who had given a stray kitten a home.

Cat’s in the middle of one of her jobs when the entire Gotham underworld loses whatever little sanity it has and begins screaming about the destruction of universal order, the apocalypse and the evils of red jelly babies.

Some twenty minutes after a frantic phone call from Harley, the unofficial  news is all the ‘insane blood thirsty murderers’ resident to Gotham’s severely smaller but no less twisted underbelly will talk about. Though things being as they were in a city like Gotham, it still takes her almost an hour to confirm the facts of what exactly happened

The first thought on her mind is, unexpectedly for the generally pragmatic Cat, outright denial: The good Commissioner had faced the unnatural and the fantastic with no fear.  He’d hunted monsters (both human and otherwise), faced aliens, spirits, zombies and more than one apocalypse.

James Gordon had spat defiance in the face of Gods and Devils with nary a thought to his own safety; he had managed to survive the impossible through sheer bullheadedness and come back up swinging time and time again.

Regardless of the scars and breaks and the lack of any true peace or rest, the Commissioner had been an unflinching, unchanging part of Gotham for as long as anyone could care to remember. Each was almost synonymous with the other in the mind of every Gothamite: there could be no Commissioner Gordon without a Gotham for him to protect and there could truly be no Gotham without a weary James Gordon for it to shelter.

The thought of steady reliable Commissioner Gordon never again addressing the public with his quiet steely voice and gruff off-hand humour was not unwanted but rather simply impossible.

‘And yet,’ Cat thinks as the late night news begins to blare out of her car’s radio, living in a world where the limits of the impossible were stretched on a daily basis did not prepare any of them for the faintest possibility of such an unthinkable occurrence.

Inevitably Selina’s thoughts move to Bruce, who would no doubt be as shaken as any other denizen of Gotham, if not more. After all, if the Bat was the dark Knight the city deserved. Then the commissioner was the great champion it had always longed for. More importantly for Selina though was the fact that the commissioner was the support that a young Bruce Wayne would have been lost without.

Still Selina can’t help but crack a small (somewhat hysterical) smile at the image of the ever gruff commissioner Gordon dressed in shining armour, riding to save the lady Gotham as her ever loyal yet wry knight, forever fighting off comical caricatures of some of her fellow criminals with nothing but a pen as his sword and a Gotham PD badge for his shield.

_Until he dies that is._

Cat’s train of thought cuts off just as her journey ends, soon enough she finds herself standing before the doors to the house that was once (however fleetingly) her home.

Alfred opens the door on Cat’s third knock, face set in his customary look of disdain he barely glances at her before dismissing her with nothing but a raised brow and a small shake of the head.

He leaves Selina to her mission, disregarding her presence in favour of nursing his own grief. ‘That or a bottle of bourbon. ’ Cat thinks. ‘Although’ Selina can’t help but add ‘for soldiers of their time is there much of a distinction?’

Perhaps for Alfred, ever the romantic cynic, the bitter burn of a drink went hand in hand with a loss of an old friend.

Cat herself brings no alcohol into the Wayne house. After all, these days there is just as much of Bruce left in the Batman as there is of Selina left in the Catwoman. Instead of a bottle of vodka or a pack of beer, a listening ear or a sympathetic shoulder, Cat carries with her an elegant knife clutched in her left pocket.

With her right hand trailing over the walls of the place that was once her home Selina allows her sense memory of days spent within the safety of these walls to guide her through the dark. She lets her memories grasp her hand with their small fingers and guide her gently through every twist and turn to the den of the man who was once, a lifetime ago, one of her closest friends.

He sits in the dark when she finds him, hunched and brooding, no doubt having pushed away whatever naive comfort his most recent stray had offered. The hunch of his shoulders and the tip of his head broadcasting a sort of detached weariness, utter grief clumsily hidden away under a cloak of apathy.

For all that their deaths had moulded him, the man who was once her friend Bruce had never truly lost many loved ones since the murder of his parents. He had never learnt to cope with the loss of someone close, even many years removed.

Turning on the dim lights. Cat studiously ignores her own reflection, the shadow of the foolish young girl still, at times, visible within the Catwoman’s eyes. She instead turns to match the gaze that moves up to meet her own.

Standing there in the doorway, looking in on the shadow of someone she once knew, Cat’s fingers clutch at the blade of her knife as her mouth twists into a sad fimsical of a smile. In that moment Bruce looked like nothing more than a young child, curled around his metaphorical wounds with no idea how to nurse the pain, having driven everyone who would have helped away.

The image rings, at once as both true and false. Their short time together, however many lifetimes ago, had proven just how resilient they were. They both knew just how well the other bore pain, how much they needed to feel the punishing ache of pushing their body through adversity.

_The compulsion to bea_ r _._

There was very little left of that naïve young Selina left in Cat and now, after their detective’s death, there is even less of that sheltered young Bruce left within the Bat.

But even she can admit that maybe there’s just enough of what once was left within the both of them that they could have this.

That what was left of her friend would appreciate in some form the companionship and solidarity of having something against which to muster his will.

_The opportunity to bear._

After all they had built themselves to be incapable of anything else.

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this one is from the James Herriot quote.


End file.
